Eberhard Havekost's work explores the problems of painting in the media age. Painted from personal photos and video footage, his imagery is rendered to highlight the limits of its own mechanically reproduced distortion. Speed is represented with the blurry lines of film, colour and light are unnatural and detached, and grim buildings and urban banalities are given a clinical rebirth. Reduced to near-abstraction, Eberhard Havekost's subjects depict not themselves, but the ever-changing expectations of representation.Intrinsic to Eberhard Havekost's work is the concept of modernity. Post-war housing, trains and aeroplanes are used as symbols of industrial power, referencing both systems of 20th century social politics and a Utopian vision. Cropped to odd angles and presented in extreme close-up, he uses the devices and formats of photography to draw parallels between the personal and generic, to falsify intimacy from public experience.



Dresden artist Eberhard Havekost paints, generic as they are, derive a certain appeal from their simplification to near abstraction. In his second New York show, he presented 14 paintings (all 1999), some recently seen at the Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst in Leipzig, that range from distinctly representational to abstractly realistic. With two exceptions that include a single figure, the paintings are variations on a theme--views of the same three or four houses, each painted from a slightly different angle, surrounded by a few trees. The houses are without distinction or personality, and Havekost further reduces them to pure form. He often frames the image so that we see only a corner of a house or a half-hidden detail of the facade, such as a window with a tree in front of it. It's not that Havekost teases form out of abstraction; he accurately renders scenes in abstract ways. These are German homes, although they could just as easily be average suburban homes in almost any corner of this country. They're tidy, but not fussy, just like Havekost's painting style.Eberhard Havekost portrays the world through the standardised deception of advertising; hues are subtly altered and forms are imperceptibly stretched or skewed. By eradicating imperfections with harsh artificial light he creates critical distance. Scenes that are intrinsically familiar are made to seem manufactured and strange. Nostalgic images of collective memory resonate with the newness of expertly packaged products.